50 you hate yourself for being a man." That shocked me. Making love to a woman did not have that effect on me at all. Mterward, I was calm, happy, tired, at rest, the opposite of disgusted. "Your novel," I asked him. "Is it a sort of political memoir?" "Not exactl I had to find a form for it. It was terribly difficult. When I started out, I found it so hard to write I got sick," he said. "I couldn't perform the physical labor. It exhausted me." I knew better than to tell him that al- though I found writing difficult, I did not suffer- I sat, I wrote, the words came. He distrusted writing that was so fluent. "When it comes easily, throw it awa It can't be any good," he said. There had to be an element of struggle in all writing. For me, everything else was a struggle. I had just turned twenty-five. Almost all of my writing had been for African pub- lications-of whIch there were many. I ached to have a publisher for my novel. " D ' " h . d " Th . on t worry; e sa1. e most Im- portant thing is to avoid making an enor- mous amount of money before you're forty: Concentrate on your writing." He was thirty-four. He seemed older than my father. I needed him because he saw something in me I did not see. He said I was a writer. When he left on the plane from En- tebbe I drove back to town feeling lonely. I liked the place less. Mrica had once seemed limitless and powerful and liber- ating, but Vidia had left me with doubts. He had belittled the politicians, ridiculed the currency, sneered at the newspapers. Mrica now seemed tin)T, self-destructive, and confining. It was full of crooked op- portunists and it was dangerous. It was nllnous and random. A note of comedy crept into my writ- ing It was an effect of my loneliness, and it startled me, but it gave me vitalitr And it seemed more authentic than the so- lemnity it had displaced. I began to un- derstand that much of what happened in Mrica was not tragedy but farce. I had begun to see it with his eyes. SIR VIOlA'S SHADOW I T was the hot English summer of 1977. Vidia was phoning from his London flat. '1\re you free for a coffee after lunch? There is someone I want you to meet." "Someone" meant a friend. Yes, of course, I wanted to meet my friend's friend. In the years that had passed since we met in Uganda, I had become a writer. I had published a dozen books, includ- ing a critical study of Naipaul's work. I had also written "The Great Railway Ba- zaar," a story of a journey by train from London to Japan, which became an instant best-seller and freed me from worry about mone When Vidia arrived at the café, a smiling woman was with him. She was slim, about my age, thirty-six or so, and wore a fluttery light dress. She had some I fJ ö ' l --I ;!:; ; f..:: ". if:... ." :,;...::':::;%: :. . :x- . ;: ';'" : J 1j. t, ."f/'{ r:if /.1r" .;;;:r." "Run jòr your lives! The Lord of the Dance is coming. " THE NEW YOR.KER., AUGUST 3, 1998 of Pat's features, the paleness, the pretty lips, the full breasts-a Pat of ten years before, but far more confident. She was from Buenos Aires. "Paul, this is Margaret." "I know all about you," she said. "I very much liked the piece you wrote about Vidia in the Telegraph." It was a portrait. I had thought: I will do what Vidia would do, write the truth, be impartial, let the peculiarities speak for themselves. Some people had come to like him on the basis of the piece, oth- ers had said they found him insufferable on the same evidence. "I recognized him in it," she said. I met Margaret again, unexpectedly, about a year and a half later, in New York. It was the snowiest day I had ever known, so snowy that the city had shut down. It was brimming with drifts, no cars, only people in the deep white street. Pat was in London; Vidia was teaching creative writing at Wesleyan. He made it from the snowdrifts of Middletown to Manhattan at the appointed time, six 0' clock. "Let's try the Oyster Bar, shall we?" he said with a note of insistence. We left my hotel and walked the fif- teen blocks to Grand Central Station in silence. Mter all these years I never took this friendship for granted. More than anything, I was inspired by the dignity of his struggle. I was thirty-seven, he was forty-six, we were both working hard. I was writing a play and contemplating a trip to South America, and he was teaching, though he had said, "Never be a teacher." There could be only one reason: he needed the money. Twelve years before, I had been the teacher and he the writer. Our positions had been reversed so dramatically that I had to be careful not to wound his dignity by mentioning it. We ordered. We talked. We drank. We ate. Vidia kept returning to the sub- ject of Wesleyan. It was corrupt, a con, a cheat, the soft option of writing courses, the laziness of students. "It's crummy, man. Crummy. I should h " never ave come. "Why did you?" "I believed they were doing some good. And the pence, of course." He made his rueful face. "But, you see, I have only myself to blame. I broke one of my Mes." From time to time he looked behind me, at a table where people were speaking